Snap is a package management system for installing and managing the applications (called Snaps) developed by Cananoical for Linux operating systems. The Snap is a bundle of an app and its dependencies that work across many different Linux distributions.
The snapd manages the snap environment on the local system, and it discovers the application (snaps) from the Snap Store and installs it on the system.
In May 2020 edition of the Linux Mint blog news, Linux Mint community announced that Linux Mint 20 would forbid the installation of snapd package via the APT package manager.
That is the reason you are getting the below message when you try to install the Snap on Linux Mint 20.
Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Package snapd is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source E: Package 'snapd' has no installation candidate
This decision was taken due to Canonical’s decision to change the method of installing the Chromium web browser from APT to Snap as Linux Mint has no control of Snap store packages.
In this guide, you will learn, how you can enable the snap application support in Linux Mint 20.
Enable Snap On Linux Mint 20
Before you can install snapd service utility, you much remove a snapd package blocking preference from the configurations of Mint Linux.
For this navigate to the the preferences.d folder inside the /etc and remove the nosnap.pref file.
$ sudo rm /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref
After removing the file, you can update the repositories of the system.
$ sudo apt update
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Now let’s install snapd in the Mint distribution to enable the snap support.
$ sudo apt install snapd
After installing the snapd package, simply logout from the system and login again.
To verify whether the snap is installed or not, execute the below command. This should output similar result.
$ snap --version
Result:
snap 2.45.1 snapd 2.45.1 series 16 linuxmint 20 kernel 5.4.0-26-generic
As you can see the snap has been successfully installed and configured in the system.
Now you can install your snap applications in Linux Mint 20 without any hustle. Simply execute the regular installation command.
Example:
$ sudo snap install opera
Installing snap store in Mint 20
You can also install the snap-store in the Mint 20 Linux to graphically install and manage the snap application.
To install snap store use the below command:
$ sudo snap install snap-store
Conclusion
So that was it, about how to enable snap support on Linux Mint 20. Let me know what you think about it in the comment section below